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Sending Your Website’s Email Through Your Own Google Workspace
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By default your website tries to send its own email, and that is why form notifications and receipts so often land in spam or vanish entirely. Nobody vouches for a message a web server sends about itself. This guide connects your website to your own Google Workspace account instead, so every email the site sends is handed to Google and sent as if you had sent it yourself. It is not a quick job, roughly half an hour to an hour, and most of that is in Google rather than in WordPress.
Why this works even when nobody can touch your DNS. Once connected, the message is genuinely sent by Google, from your own account, so it automatically inherits whatever email authentication your domain already has. If your normal Workspace email arrives properly today, your website’s email will too. That is the whole appeal: no DNS records to add, nothing for us to change at your registrar, and it stays entirely in your hands.
Is this the right choice for you?
There are two sensible ways to fix website email and this is only one of them.
| Through our mail service | Through your own Google Workspace | |
|---|---|---|
| Who sets it up | Us. Usually done before you notice. | You, following this guide. |
| Effort for you | None. | Half an hour to an hour, once. |
| Needs DNS access | Yes, ours or your registrar’s. | No. |
| Who owns the sending | Us. | You. |
| Suits | Most sites. Higher volumes. | Sites where nobody has DNS access, or where you would rather it ran through your own account. |
The volume question matters. Google allows a normal Workspace user around 2,000 messages a day, which is far more than any contact form or order receipt will ever need. It is not the right home for a newsletter or a large mailing list. If you send bulk email, keep that on a service built for it and use this only for the site’s own notifications.
Before you start
- You need to be an administrator of your Google Workspace account and an administrator of your website. These are two different logins and you need both open.
- You will create something called a Google Cloud project. The name is intimidating and the thing itself is not. It is free, it is just a container so Google knows which website is asking, and you will never look at it again.
- Decide which address the site should send from before you begin. Changing it later means redoing part of this.
- Set aside an uninterrupted hour the first time. It is a sequence of small steps where the order matters.
Read the “publish the app” step before you start, not when you reach it. There is one setting in the middle of this that, if left at its default, makes everything appear to work perfectly and then stop dead exactly one week later. It is the single most common way this setup fails and it is explained below.
Part one: in Google
Google’s own screens change more often than we could keep screenshots current, so for the click-by-click follow WP Mail SMTP’s own documentation, which is always more up to date than anything we would copy. What follows is the shape of the job and the parts that catch people out.
- Sign in at console.cloud.google.com with your Workspace administrator account. Not a personal Gmail.
- Create a project. Call it something you will recognise in two years, such as your domain name followed by the word website.
- Enable the Gmail API. Under APIs and Services, then Library, search for Gmail API and enable it. Nothing works without this and it is easy to skip past.
- Fill in the consent screen. Google asks for an app name and a support email. Use your business name and your own address. Nobody outside your business ever sees this.
- Create credentials of type Web application. This produces two long strings, a Client ID and a Client Secret. Keep the tab open.
- Set the authorised redirect URI to exactly this, with nothing added and nothing missing:
https://connect.wpmailsmtp.com/google/
A single stray character here produces an error later that does not explain itself. - Change the publishing status from Testing to Production. On a Workspace account this may be worded as making the app external. Do not skip this. See the warning below.
If you leave the app in Testing, Google cuts the connection after seven days. This is Google’s documented behaviour, not a fault in the plugin or your site. Everything works, you send a test, it arrives, you tick the job off. A week later the site’s email silently stops and nothing obvious has changed. If your website email works and then fails after roughly a week, this is almost certainly why, and the fix is to set the publishing status to Production and reconnect.
Part two: in WordPress
- In your dashboard go to WP Mail SMTP, then Settings.
- Set the From Email to the address you decided on, and the From Name to your business name.
- Choose Google / Gmail as the mailer.
- Paste in the Client ID and Client Secret. Paste them, do not retype them, and check you have not picked up a trailing space.
- Save, then click the button allowing the plugin to send email using your Google account. Google will ask you to sign in and approve. Approve it.
- You should return to your site with the connection shown as active.
- Send a test email from the Email Test tab, to an address outside your own domain such as a personal address. Sending to yourself proves less than you think.
The From address rule
The site can only send as the Google account you connected, or as an address that account is already allowed to send as. If you connect as [email protected] but set the From Email to [email protected], Google will either rewrite it or refuse it.
If you want a different sending address, set it up properly in Google first, either as an alias on that account or under its send-as settings, and then use it here. Guessing at an address that does not exist is a common cause of a test that fails with no useful error.
When it stops working
This connection is not permanent and that is normal. Three things break it, in order of how often we see them:
- The app was left in Testing. Seven days, then silence. Covered above.
- Somebody changed the Google account password. Google deliberately invalidates this kind of connection when the password changes. If you have just been through a password reset and your forms went quiet at the same time, that is not a coincidence.
- The connection went unused for six months. Rare on a busy site, common on a quiet one.
In all three cases the repair is the same and takes two minutes: go back to WP Mail SMTP, then Settings, and re-authorise the Google connection. You do not need to redo the Google Cloud work.
Worth knowing before it happens. Because the failure is silent, the first sign is usually a customer saying they filled in your form and never heard back. If your site sends anything you would miss, ask us about adding email logging so a failure is visible rather than invisible.
What to send us if it will not connect
We can help, but not from “it does not work”. Send us:
- The exact error, copied as text or screenshotted in full.
- The publishing status of your app in Google Cloud, Testing or Production.
- The address you connected with, and the From Email you set.
- Whether the Gmail API shows as enabled.
Never send us your Client Secret by email. We do not need it, and it is the one part of this that should never leave your own screen. If we genuinely need to look, we will ask you to add us to the site rather than send it.
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